Kevin Stevens is a Class C certified Contractor living and working in Colorado. He is also working on his own tiny house project in Northern New Mexico. He has been following various aspects of the tiny house movement for years.

The
quest for our land was a quest to find more seasonal balance in our lives. Nederland has
been good to us: it has a slower pace then the “flats”, what we call Boulder and the
surrounding front range, but also gives us ready access to the culture of a
larger city when we feel the need for it. We still wanted to experience four seasons, so a place that still has a
winter was a desire- just not 9 months of it!

Last year we had snow just up the hill from us in the middle of
August. We have also watched the
fireworks on the 4th of July from inside the living room as a light snow was
falling. It is one of the hardships we
endure by living at over 8000 feet. However, the mild summers, 300+ sunny days a year and hearing cougars
and coyotes on a summer night do their part to make up for it.

View from our ranch at night

Both
Tori and I have been attracted to the desert, me for quite a few years
more. Road trips to Utah and points further west developed a
longing for the scent of sagebrush on the wind after a rainstorm. But the intense heat of summer steered us away
from places like Moab, and
most of Arizona. Creating art is a big part of our lives and
artist like other artists, so we thought
of desert areas that are supportive to artist. Naturally this led us to northern New
Mexico: Georgia O’Keeffe spent many years
there. Years ago I had traveled through Taos and admired the
landscape, the architecture, the food and culture. Sagebrush is abundant there along with
pinon, and Juniper, a lot of the locals simply call it the PJ. I have often bought pinon and Juniper incense
to recapture the scent from campfires there.

Our
land searching began online with some local real estate listings. A few months of looking gave us an idea of
what was available, we printed some listings, found them on maps and with
Google Earth looked to see what the area landscape might be. I also got in touch with a local real estate
agent there. In November of 2009 our
quest took on some more texture via a road trip, on the way also checked out
some areas in Colorado north of the Taos area. Armed with a digital camera and a GPS we
explored about half a dozen listings, one that was at the top of our list based
on the online pics, turned out to be a disappointment. The lot itself was
great, the soil was sandy in some areas, had some good mixed tree cover and
important to us had some great rock outcroppings and diversity of terrain.

The price was in our budget, and the
community was interesting (We spent an
afternoon at “Poco Loco” the local market / hangout for a neighborhood post
Halloween celebration.) Unfortunately
the entry to the lot had some “trashy” neighbors. The road in, which would be our future
driveway, had huge piles of junk near it, bottles, cans, misc. construction
stuff, old building projects etc. We
could just not bear to have to drive past that every day. We spent that night camping nearby on some
forest service land. I called up our
agent and arranged to meet her the next day for some more property tours.

After
hooking up with Liz, we toured some more vacant land and also some homes
located on some area parcels. Late in
the afternoon we hooked up with Gil and Deb for a tour of one of the four,
twenty-acre parcels they had for sale, they were friends of Liz from years past
and had not yet officially listed these lots.

The
lot that we had the most interest in was the one furthest from the highway and
it had some rock outcroppings along the southern edge. We liked it but were not
that impressed. The 80 acres they had
for sale was part of their larger ranch there- about 720 acres total. After we looked at the end parcel Gil wanted
to show us the Petaca which lies just east of their square mile. On the way to the overlook we saw an
interesting smaller side canyon and I asked if we could check it out. We hiked
up through there and were very impressed with it. We threw the idea out there that we liked
that area more. Ater touring the
overlook we took the ATV’s across the road and back into some cool nearby
forest service land. (I forgot to
mention that nearby access to public land was also a selection criteria for
us).

They
wined and dined us that night in one of their cabins across the road, put us up
for the night and let us borrow the ATVs again the next day. This time with the
aide of their old but somewhat accurate property map we checked out the area
that impressed us the day before. This
area was quite a bit larger than we were originally thinking, about 40 acres
(the first “trashy” place was only 7 acres- one of the earth ship properties was
12; Gill and Debs other lots 20) The beauty and peacefulness of it took hold
of us. We had found our place! We believe that certain areas have a type of
magnetism for some people: Tori and I call this “The Magic of Place"- we spent
the later part of that afternoon working with Liz to write up an offer.

Well, as
they say in the movies the rest is history! We now own just under 42 acres of
diverse: PJ with an abundance of Sagebrush ; )